A lot of people have been emailing us about an issue we are having with one of our ads taking over OSNews. Thank you all for emailing us, the information provided is of good use to us. We are currently working on the problem, and will let you know once it has been fixed. We would like to apologise for the inconvenience. Update by DA: I think that I've tracked down the offender. Read more for details Update 2: This time I think we really fixed it.

Okay, I'll give it a shot. I'll disable adblock on osnews. I will do this because I visit nearly every day, and find value in the site. As others have said, osnews' ad content was never that annoying to me compared to many other sites out there.

But if I experience something like that described in this piece, it will be going back on again, and I can't promise I will be conscientious enough to write an email and complain first. IMHO, webmasters who choose to prop their costs up with ad revenue (which I totally support in principle) should treat the respectability of their ad-partners just like any other QA factor such as valid HTML/CSS and accessibility. If it's broke, you should know it's broke. Don't you look at your own site?

Then you turn the responsibility back on the ad partners: if their content damages your site's good name, you and anyone who listens to your word-of-mouth will not touch them again. Television and print advertisers are held to account by legislation and public regulators (in the UK at least); until this can be said of Internet advertising, the webmasters need to do that job to some extent.

A code of conduct regarding content and technical methods, which could be invoked in all contracts between webmasters and ad partners, would be a step in the right direction.